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Protesters against President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's plan to reform the electoral authority, in Mexico City, Mexico, February 26, 2023.
Hard Numbers: Mexicans protest AMLO changes, North Korea seeks grain, Iran hearts Ipanema, a controversial kiss from Kosovo
500,000 or 90,000?: How many people in Mexico City took part in recent mass protests against President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s overhaul of the electoral system? Organizers say 500,000 turned out to oppose the changes, which would weaken independent election oversight. But authorities in Mexico City, which is controlled by AMLO’s party, say it was only 90,000.
1 million: North Korea is estimated to be short at least 1 million tons of grain right now because of mismanagement and pandemic-related interruptions of imports from China. That’s equal to about one-fifth of the Hermit Kingdom’s annual consumption. In the past, North Korea has suffered famines so bad that people were forced to eat grass and tree bark.
2: Brazil’s government allowed two Iranian warships to dock in Rio de Janeiro over the weekend, despite demands from the US to turn them away. The move is a reminder that although Presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Joe Biden may see eye to eye on a lot, Lula’s perspective — in line with much of the Global South — often differs from Washington’s on key issues such as China, Iran, and Ukraine.
3: The young Kosovo artist Ermira Murati has gotten thousands of threats over her striking, 3-meter tall painting of Kosovo PM Albin Kurti and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic kissing. The two leaders, who famously despise each other, are meeting early this week in Brussels to try to reach a peace deal. Here’s our recent piece on why that’s so hard to do. And, while we’re kissing in the former Eastern bloc, here’s one of the greatest smooches of the 20th century.
January 6 committee partisan battle; SCOTUS rules on election reform
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is forming a January 6th committee to investigate the Capitol insurrection. What do you expect to come from it?
Well, the committee is allowed to perform with the input from minority Republicans, but the Republicans are basically refusing to participate. Which means that most committee members, with the exception of probably Liz Cheney, the Trump critical member of Congress from Wyoming and daughter of the former vice president, are going to be Democrats. And the Democrats are going to probably go into this with an earnest desire to look at what happened on January 6th, who instigated the riot, why it happened, why the signs were missed at the Capitol by the Capitol police and others. What's likely going to come out of this is a lot of partisan messaging, trying to link the Republican party to the insurgence that stormed the Capitol on January 6th. That will help to harden views around January 6th and lead to more ongoing partisan battling in the advance of the 2022 midterm elections. So, expect a lot of heat, but not a lot of light to come out of this investigation. It'll probably be dismissed by Republican critics, even if its findings were to be sound.
The Supreme Court this week ruled on several voting rights cases. What are the implications for the future?
The Supreme Court this week ruled in a voting rights case in Arizona that limited the application of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Which, after the Supreme Court's ruling on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act several years ago, undermines some of the protections that are provided by the Act by requiring extremely high standard for plaintiffs to show that an election law is in fact discriminatory. What the court wanted to say was that the discriminatory effects are not enough to show discrimination, and this will make future cases brought under Section 2 unlikely to succeed. This is relevant because the DOJ just last week sued the state of Georgia for the discriminatory impact of their new voting rights law. The burden will be on them now to show a racially discriminatory intent. So, this is good news for Republicans who are trying to pass more laws in states that roll back some of the loosenings of election law that we've seen in recent years, particularly during the pandemic. But it's bad news for election law reformers and Democrats who want to try to make voting as easy and accessible to as many groups as possible as they can. One further implication of this new ruling is that the Democrats in Congress will continue to push on a new voting rights act. You've got at least two holdouts among Democrats who don't want to change the legislative filibuster rules. And no Republicans are expected to embrace those reforms, which means this will continue to be a partisan fight, at least through the midterm elections, and probably beyond. A very big issue in us politics
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Why election reform laws are deadlocked on Capitol Hill
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
With the For the People Act not passed in the Senate, what's the outlook on Democrats' election reform?
Well, the thing about election laws is that they're really all about power, how to get it, how to maintain it once you have it. And the Republicans and the Democrats are unlikely to agree on even the basics of what's wrong with our election system today, and they were definitely unlikely to agree on how to reform those things. So there's really no consensus on Capitol Hill on what's broken about the current election law. You've got Republicans at the state level who are pushing, rolling back some of the more generous rules that were laid out during coronavirus. You also have some that are trying to combat President Trump's allegations of widespread fraud during the 2020 election cycle. Democrats, on the other hand, are doing everything they can to make it easier to vote, to expand access to the vote. And that's part of what was in the federal legislation that Republicans voted down.
There's really no next steps for this law now that Republicans have said they're not going to go for it. There never really was a path to get this passed into law this year without changing the Senate's filibuster rules, and there's enough moderate Democrats who have ruled that out. That's not on the table. So election reform is going to continue to move on probably at the state level and at the federal level, you're going to be deadlocked at least as long as neither party in the Senate has a supermajority.
Amid criticism, Vice President Harris is traveling to the Southern border, what is the Biden administration's border security strategy?
Well, a big part of the border security strategy has been telling migrants to stay at home. Vice President Harris was very explicit in this message in her tour of Central America a few weeks ago. Otherwise, the Biden ministration is consistent with law, rehousing minors that arrive in the US until their claims can be processed and also sending back unaccompanied adults. What they're not doing is adopting many of the more harsh strategies of the Trump administration, including building a border wall and separating families. What eventually they're probably going to have to try to do is come up with a deal with Mexico and try to deal with immigration at its root source in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, three of the countries that are going through a hard time and sending a lot of migrants north right now.
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